2015.03.31

Indiana's "religious freedom" bill you know all about, but tomorrow afternoon, a Tennessee House subcommittee will meet to discuss HB 0566, which would prevent public institutions of learning from disciplining students in counseling, social work, and psychology programs if they turn gay clients away due to their "sincerely-held religious beliefs." How do we determine if religious beliefs are "sincerely-held," by the way? Do we open people up and count rings? Anyway, you already know the trouble with that idea: if you're training in any counseling field, your instructors are supposed to ensure you get exposed to a wide diversity of problems and experiences -- and that means, not incidentally, that students who get accredited in Tennessee might not be able to work in very many other places in America, since people in other states can choose counselors whose schools did force their students to do all kinds of work and broaden their horizons. So the Tennessee Equality Project has begun a petition on change.org that helps you tell the Tennessee House Education, Instruction, and Programs Subcommittee to reject another "turn away the gays" bill.

Meanwhile, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your House Reps to support H.R. 1232, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act. What would H.R. 1232 do? It would, as its title suggests, stanch the flow of military goodies to local police forces, by disallowing such transfers in the name of counter-drug operations and by limiting the kinds of weapons DoD can transfer in the first place. The bill puts other hurdles up, too, and right-leaning folk might call that "bureaucracy," but I don't see what's so damn hard about accounting to your government why you need the weapons and how you're going to use them. Sadly, though weariness of tough-on-crime law enforcement strategies remains a bipartisan feeling among our nation's good citizens, only two of the 45 House sponsors of H.R. 1232 are Republicans -- libertarian-inflected Justin Amash of Michigan you'd probably figure, California gadfly Tom McClintock you probably wouldn't. But again: it doesn't matter what they want. It matters what we want. And if we believe it, sooner or later they'll have to believe it, too, if they want to keep their jobs.

Finally, hot on the heels of the World Health Organization's declaration that Monsanto-produced herbicide Roundup is a "probable carcinogen," CREDO helps you tell the EPA and FDA to ban glyphosate (Roundup's main ingredient) in herbicides. We've been using glyphosate on crops since the 1970s, and while glyphosate replaced some considerably less-healthy herbicides then commonly in use, often you don't know how bad something is until you've used it for a while, and when big ag is sponsoring most studies of the matter, well, you may not know how bad it is at all. But the WHO disregarded industry-funded science in concluding that glyphosate probably causes cancer, and while it didn't assess the precise risk of getting cancer from glyphosate, it found enough evidence that we really should be conservative about this. Glyphosate is now the most-used herbicide on Earth, its wide use prompting the development of genetically-engineered crops that can withstand it better, the promulgation of which has spurred, in turn, the development of glyphosate-resistant weeds. We should fight these trends, of course, but we should also get back into the mindset that we should grow our food, rather than buy it.

ProPublica finds holes in the CFPB's payday loan proposal. I'm more sanguine about it than they are, partly because I know regulation is an ongoing process as each side adjusts to the other, and partly because (as ProPublica says) the regulations will likely cut payday loans by at least 60 percent. But how did I miss the part where Congress won't let the CFPB set maximum interest rates? That sounds like a negative campaign ad waiting to happen!

FactCheck.org takes up what I imagine will be a Herculean task, "Fact-checking Ted Cruz." I highlight this post (titled "Part II") because of a meme that's been making the rounds lately, which I'll put through my right-wing translator so you can better understand it: ZOMG MORE BIZNIZZEZ FAILZ TAHN EVURZ!!!!! It's actually not true -- "The number of business establishment deaths is currently well below the record" ("set in late 2008" under a crumbling Republican Presidency, naturally), and anyway, people who repeat that lie don't take into account the number of business establishments that deserve to die, never really get off the ground, or go under for reasons unrelated to success or failure.

2015.03.30

Now that they control both houses of Congress, Republicans want to repeal the Estate Tax, again -- because the various Estate Tax cuts negotiated and signed by President Obama somehow aren't enough! And Republicans are trotting out one of the oldest zombie lies in the annals of zombie lies: that the Estate Tax "destroys family farms." Seriously, it's like they think no one in America has any memory of anything at all -- particularly, any memory of Republicans being completely unable to produce evidence of even one family farm sold off to pay the Estate Tax back in Tha Bush Mobb years. And yet they're at this mess again -- maybe they're a little subtler, but that's all. So now would be a good time to call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper left hand corner of this page, and command them to oppose Estate Tax repeal. Nothing prevents you from adding that you think they're lying if they spread around horror stories about the Estate Tax hurting family farms. They want us to act all civilized to them? Then they need to stop lying on behalf of their wealthy donors, the real beneficiaries of Estate Tax repeal. It ain't that damn tough.

Meanwhile, a Peruvian appeals court ruled in late 2014 against Newmont Mining's efforts to build an open-pit gold mine on lands belonging to indigenous activist Máxima Acuña de Chaupe. How did Newmont Mining respond? By saying it'd respect the court's decision, then tucking its tail between its legs and going home? Well, no -- Newmont has prodded security officers to raid her home and destroy a part of it. This, after Newmont sued her to get her off the land she owns, after trying several times to evict her from said land themselves -- a nefarious effort helped along by the government of Peru, culminating in a hefty fine and a nearly three-year jail sentence for her and three others, all of which, happily, the appeals court eventually threw out. So Sum of Us helps you tell Newmont to stop harassing indigenous activists -- who could, after all, be any one of us one day, once our politicians interpret eminent domain laws as a tool to steal our homes and give them to their big donors, or some "free" trade agreement makes us bail out every corporation that wants to break our labor and environmental laws.

Finally, McDonald's has pledged to phase out antibiotic-raised chicken, joining Chick-Fil-A, Panera Bread, and Chipotle in that effort, but other fast-food chains haven't taken that step, and that's a big deal, since, generally, the poorer we get, the more fast food we eat. So CREDO helps you tell Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Subway, and Wendy's to stop using chicken raised with antibiotics. The reason we ask them is twofold: one, four out of every five antibiotics in America get used on healthy farm animals in order to make them meatier -- not, as you might imagine, on sick people and animals. That means bacteria will have many, many more opportunities to evolve into antibiotic-resistant bacteria like MRSA, and we might one day have a "post-antibiotic world" (in the World Health Organization's words) in which a single cut you wouldn't think twice about today could kill you. The other reason we ask them? Because petitioning our government hasn't done very much, even though courts have mandated that the FDA fix this problem for, ahem, decades now. We'll keep after our government, of course, because it's our duty, but why fight on only one front?

UPDATE. I did not know, at the time of this post's writing, that the Senate had already voted on Friday to repeal the Estate Tax 54-46. You'll want to concentrate your efforts on your House Reps; chances are that will look suspiciously like a party-line vote, but speaking out is always better than silence.

Citizens for Tax Justice alerts us to Sen. Ted Cruz's support for the flat tax and the so-called FAIR Tax. The former would replace low- and high-income tax brackets with a single tax bracket, the latter would replace the income tax with a national 30% sales tax, and both would give the rich yet another massive, unearned tax cut while slamming middle-class working families hard. Say it with me: Ted Cruz will increase your taxes. Again: Ted Cruz will increase your taxes. Now all we need to do to make Ted toast is get the "liberal" media to keep repeating it -- a difficult task, admittedly, given their utter cowardice in the face of right-wing bluster.

2015.03.27

The Dodd-Frank financial services reform law mandated that banks (and other public corporations) reveal the relationship between CEO pay and median employee pay. Unfortunately, Dodd-Frank left it up to the Securities and Exchange Commission to put that rule into effect, and to decide exactly how much information that rule would mandate revealing; fast-forward nearly five years, and the SEC still hasn't done bupkus on this matter. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the SEC to enact the most vigorous CEO-to-median-worker pay rule possible. I'll try to put this simply: this economy doesn't work for people who work to contribute to society anymore. It works for people who already have money and can use mysterious financial "instruments" to induce corporations to succeed and fail not on the merits, but on their whims. Shining some light on CEO pay, particularly as it relates to worker pay, would allow good citizens to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR effectively, and could help us reverse the downward moral and economic spiral this "New Economy" has created.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress and the President to make marijuana a Schedule II drug instead of a Schedule I drug via S. 683, the CARERS Act, then Keystone Progress joins with MoveOn to help you do that. Schedule I drugs, as you probably know, are drugs that are nominally extremely dangerous and have no medicinal benefits, so why is pot there? I'm sure it's at least partly because the cotton lobby has long wanted to strangle the hemp industry to death (pot, like many more useful things, comes from hemp), but I'm also sure hysteria over drugs in general has played a part. Yet heroin is a Schedule I drug because it will destroy your life completely; pot is about as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco, which the Controlled Substances Act doesn't schedule at all, and pot also has some utility in treating epilepsy, PTSD, cancer, and Parkinson's Disease. And you don't need to be a legalize-all-the-drugs libertarian to support this effort -- if nothing else, supporting this effort means we can crack down harder on meth manufacturers and their ilk.

In other news, Sen. Mikulski (D-MD) has reintroduced S. 862, the Paycheck Fairness Act, yesterday. S. 862 would address the persistent income gap between men and women for doing the same work by prohibiting employers from retaliating against workers who discuss their income with each other -- which is usually how women find out they've been discriminated against -- and also by forcing employers to prove that they pay men and women differently because of actual differences in qualifications, which most employers don't go very far out of their way to do. Republicans have consistently filibustered the Paycheck Fairness Act, and what are their objections? Obama, mainly, and trial lawyers, secondarily. You'll never convince a Republican that "Obama" is no reason to block progress -- maybe even after a real Democrat becomes President and makes the Obama years seem to them like paradise on Earth! -- but "trial lawyers" also means nothing in a nation where corporations file four out of every five lawsuits. Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Finally, S. 697, the Vitter/Udall chemical "reform" bill, is still out there confusing people about the definition of "reform." You're no doubt aware of its defects -- that it would prevent states from regulating dangerous chemicals while the EPA is evaluating them, and not only provides for a rather slow evaluating process for dangerous chemicals (the EPA would only have to start reviewing a little over two dozen of them within the next five years), but certainly doesn't take into account the EPA's chronic underfunding, which (though it might offend Sen. Enzi!) we should certainly address. Sen. Tom Udall's participation is rather disheartening, since he just won re-election rather handily in a very tough year; hopefully he won't tell us that we have to support this bill to get some progress, when, fact is, we don't -- especially not when S. 725, the Boxer/Markey bill, is also out there, albeit without big chemical corporations' support. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Vitter/Udall chemical "reform" bill, and support real chemical reform in America.

Ho hum, three "progressive" Democrats join together to sell the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal to Teh Librulz. And they're peddling the same swill -- we better take this agreement or we'll have no say over trade, as if rejecting this agreement somehow isn't a way of having a "say" over trade. And fast-tracking these bills defeats the purpose of "having a say" in trade matters, since you have less of a say when you don't amend a bill or limit debate on it. On the plus side, I suppose: former Gov. Gregoire sounds like she's totally phoning in her fast-track support.

Finally, the Consumerist plays "Where Are They Now?" with your favorite 1990s websites, like AOL, Geocities, anad AltaVista. Out of all the big '90s players, only Yahoo! (still a good news aggregator) still stands in anything like its original form, though AOL's sheer persistence is to be admired, I suppose -- though AltaVista (my search engine of choice until Google outdid it) or Netscape (which I used all the way into the middle of 2001, and whose soul exists in Firefox, my web brower of choice today) deserve more admiration, certainly. Maybe Geocities, too, which I always found hard to load in the '90s and I'm pretty sure that was my loss.

2015.03.26

First things first: Sen. Portman (R-OH), that reputed "moderate," has introduced a Senate budget amendment which would let states "opt out" of a Clean Air Act provision covering pollution from smokestacks. If you're the kind of person who likes to live and let live, and thinks that, well, maybe we can give individual states a little leeway regarding clean air laws, simply answer one simple question: do air pollutants respect state boundary lines? If the answer is "no" -- which, spoiler alert! The answer is no -- then you cannot in good conscience support such an amendment. And what does that have to do with budgeting anyway? Sen. Sanders offered an amendment closing corporate tax loopholes to pay for infrastructure improvements, and Sen. Enzi (R-WY) claimed he voted against it because Sen. Sanders's amendment should have been heard by a different committee. In light of that strange explanation, I wonder how Sen. Enzi will justify voting for Sen. Portman's amendment. Anyway, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Sen. Portman's dirty air amendment.

Meanwhile, despite its deficit-preening, Congress actually aims to add to the Department of Defense's Overseas Contingency Operations account for war-making, even though Congress has not declared a war, or done anything to restrain President Obama's war-making adventures in the Middle East, in some time now. This so-called "Pentagon slush fund" essentially allows Defense to skirt difficult questions like shouldn't we pay for wars out of whatever money we allocate through the budgeting process? and do we really want to keep paying for open-ended military adventures without clear goals? For some people, the latter is not a difficult question: they're the ones still saying ZOMG TEH MUZLIMZ WILL KILLZ ALL TEH PEEPULZ!!!!, which, as we remember from living through Tha Bush Mobb years, can be twisted to justify just about any policy objective. But they don't get all the say around here! So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell Congress to end the "Pentagon slush-fund."

In other news, the Bureau of Land Management has released finalized rules for fracking on public lands, and, as you may expect, it takes a few steps forward (prohibiting those awful open pits for fracking fluid storage) while leaving a lot of work undone -- important work, like making fracking corporations disclose the chemicals they use to us, and not to some corporate, third-party website. Or getting rid of "trade secret exemptions" to disclosure rules. Or giving local communities more of a heads-up before fracking starts in their backyards. And we already know that fracking puts toxic chemicals in our drinking water -- so much so that it becomes flammable, gelatinous, or brackish -- and our air, just as we already know that claims that expanded fracking will slow the advance of climate change is rather optimistic, when you consider that methane packs a much larger climate-change wallop than even carbon dioxide. Luckily, Rep. Pocan (D-WI) has introduced a bill to ban fracking on public lands outright, and Food and Water Watch helps you tell the BLM to enact much stricter rules regarding fracking on public lands.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to force campaign finance disclosure from federal contractors, then both Common Cause and People for the American Way still help you do that. We can do that, of course, because, well, who pays federal contractors? We do, that's who -- with our taxes -- and don't we deserve to know what those contractors are doing with our money? You know, since it's our money? There's no arguing that we're "singling out" federal contractors unfairly, because, again -- and let me know if I'm belaboring the point -- it's our money. And though Congress would certainly try to stop President Obama from doing his job if he does issue such an order, they can't actually stop him unless they pass a bill either nullifying the order or stripping him of his authority to issue such an order -- and, well, President Obama would get to veto such a bill, and the Republicans in Congress couldn't override it, given their numbers. It's a no-brainer, really -- which is probably why Mr. Obama won't do it without massive public pressure.

Jeb Bush says businesses have a right to discriminate against gay folks. And he's the "gay-friendly" Republican! I must have missed the part where "gay-friendly" means nothing more than "not actively trying to exterminate gays." Please, Jeb Bush, please say what you really want to say: when a business tries to sell high-end products to a wealthy audience, that's discrimination, too! Of course, it's not -- people can become wealthy if they want to buy those high-end products (though that's getting tougher all the time and I would never recommend such a spiritual path in the first place), but gay folks can't change being gay, any more than black folks can change being black. Enough with the special rights for bigots!

Speaking of which, Indiana seems poised to enact SB 101, a "religious conscience" bill allowing folks to discriminate against gays if they find gays icky their Jesus tells them gays are icky, but the corporation that puts on the Gen Con gaming convention in Indiana every year says it could leave the state over SB 101. And Gen Con is the biggest convention in Indianapolis every year, so the local economy would feel it. SB 101 has also drawn the ire of George Takei, also known as "the most popular man on Facebook." If nothing else, all this puts Gov. Pence in a tough spot. Who does he side with: bigots or corporations?

Wisconsin Republicans "want to take away your weekend," according to Moshe Z. Marvit at The Nation. What they actually want to do is allow workers to "voluntarily" choose to work seven days in a row without the legally-mandated 24 hours of rest -- and since bosses can force workers to "volunteer" for such service, the article's title isn't anywhere near as overheated as it might sound. That would follow gutting of both public and private sector unions -- and I bet Gov. Walker signs this bill, too, since even when he says he won't do bad things he does them.

Finally, from the "somehow not The Onion" file: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who recently launched his Presidential campaign, is signing up for Obamacare! No lie: he was getting health insurance through his wife's plan, but his wife just took a leave of absence from her job at Goldman-Sachs in order to help out with his campaign, so they both have their hands out now. Just kidding, of course: the Affordable Care Act is hardly the "handout" right-wingers claim it is, but of course they call it a "handout" because they don't want our government doing anything for anyone other than big corporations. And also because they're haters.

2015.03.25

H.R. 1466, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, would, as its title suggests, repeal both the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 -- because you might as well go big, and the aforementioned laws are two of the worst humiliations ever visited upon the American people by the Congress that purports to represent them. These two bills have birthed (or sanctioned) the massive surveillance state begun by George W. Bush and expanded by Barack Obama, which latter development should not have surprised anyone who watched Barack Obama the Candidate rail against warrantless wiretapping only to see Barack Obama the Senator vote for the FISA Amendments Act because of "the grave threats we face." And thanks to Edward Snowden's revelations, we also know that sunsetting the most controversial PATRIOT Act provisions hasn't delivered the oversight its supporters promised -- or else our government's spying upon us wouldn't have gotten so much worse over the years. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Surveillance State Repeal Act.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell oil corporation Royal Dutch Shell to sever ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Why? Well, mainly because ALEC has given us some of the most anti-freedom state legislation ever, which includes Voter ID laws, "Show Your Papers" laws, ag-gag laws, "three strikes" laws, tort "reform" laws, tax-cuts-for-the-rich laws, anti-community broadband laws -- need I continue? And Shell's CEO has said that climate change is an actual, real thing that we can and should fight, whereas ALEC says it's not, and with other corporations (now including British Petroleum!) lately cutting ties with ALEC for its climate change denialism, Shell is also feeling the pressure. And ALEC has also been supporting efforts to make home solar power users pay a "sun tax" out of the absurd belief that solar power users are "free riders" on the electric grid. No oil corporation should want to be caught up in any of ALEC's madness -- people are already suspicious enough of oil corporation motives, after all.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support paid family medical leave, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Most of us get 12 weeks of unpaid family medical leave, thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act, but try not getting paid for three months so you can take care of a newborn baby or a sick parent, or so you can get that surgery you've been putting off. You'll find yourself behind on your bills and with creditors knocking at your door, if you're lucky enough to still have a place to live. But the FAMILY Act (H.R. 1439) would allow you to make up to two-thirds of your salary while you're out taking care of business, and despite the squeals of the WE'RE BROKE!!!!! crowd, a .2% tax (that's one-tenth of two percent, "liberal" media, not "2 percent") would fund the entire thing, and then finally we could be like the 177 nations on Earth that have, for example, paid family leave for new mothers. Really, do you want to let your can-do pride put you in the poorhouse? Why not avail yourself of an insurance program that you pay into?

2015.03.24

Pennsylvania residents, take note: state Sen. Vincent Hughes (D-7) plans to introduce legislation which would automatically register good Pennsylvanians to vote whenever they get any sort of state service (like a drivers' license) from an agency the state currently authorizes to assist with voter registration. Voters who don't want to register to vote can simply opt out of that registration within three weeks, and registration of course doesn't obligate people to vote, which is as it should be. All of that should answer the haters who would exclaim TEH STATE FORCEZ TEH PEEPULZ TO DO THINGZ!!!! Nah, just kidding -- nothing ever satisfies a hater. Anyway, Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA Governor and state legislator to support making it easier, not harder, for voters to register and therefore vote. The state legislature did go through an awful lot of trouble, under Gov. Corbett, to pass draconian Voter ID laws that state courts eventually struck down. It's about time we made it easier for people to vote -- and make politicians work harder to persuade people to vote for them.

Meanwhile, you know that House and Senate Republican budgets are mean to working families while being quite obsequious to the "needs" of the wealthy for more tax cuts so they can "create jobs" -- but you may not know that these budgets cut food stamp funding, again. Clearly they're emboldened by the fact that they were able to get pretty hefty food stamp cuts last year out of a divided Congress, but I am prepared to accept a lengthy government shutdown, with all of the problems that entails, so that Congress doesn't cut food stamps any further. So Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to stop cutting food stamps. It's really very simple: if Congress pursued actual job-creation programs, like taxing millionaire income at 91% and closing corporate tax loopholes so the rich and the corporate will have to create jobs for other people just to avoid paying taxes on their money, maybe then we can cut food stamps. But posturing about the value of hard work, when our casino economy no longer rewards hard work, is quite disgusting, and our leaders should really avoid it.

Finally, I haven't passed along action alerts opposing "free" trade agreements and the "fast-tracking" thereof in a few days, so the Campaign for America's Future (among other organizations) helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject "fast-track," while Public Citizen helps you tell Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), lately the Democrats' point man on advancing the "free" trade agenda, to reject fast-track. And the newest hostage crisis our leaders have tried to perpetrate, in order to scare us into acquiescence of "free" trade's ability to nullify our laws? Their suggestion that doing this deal would give us some say over the world economy. That suggestion, of course, is completely illogical: doing a bad deal so we have some say is absurd, when we would presumably use that say to get a good deal, or to avoid a bad deal. And, as usual, none of that explains in any way why we need to "fast-track" the deal with as little debate and amendment as possible. Nothing the "free" traders say makes any damn sense -- I'd say the Emperor has no clothes, but calling them "Emperor" would be giving them too much credit.

Paul Buchheit describes "How Privatization Degrades Our Daily Lives." Long story short: privatizing public services doesn't save money, it costs money. Long story somewhat longer: privatizing health care makes us captive to whatever health care corporations want, privatizing public housing gives that over to hifalutin bankster schemes, privatizing the internet gives us slower, more costly service, and the U.S. Post Office is so "terrible" that FedEx (a.k.a. Newt Gingrich's favorite corporation) uses it for three out of every 10 ground shipments. If you think privatization is a scam designed to enrich some politician's cronies, you're not alone. Ironic, since privatizers long argued that public corruption could be avoided by privatization.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates fears the spread of artificial intelligence. But he sounds like he's simply been asleep during every one of Windows's multitudinous updates and patches. Duplicating or surpassing the human brain is a lot harder than folks realize, and software needs fairly constant maintenance -- especially with regards to security -- and I think the latter task, especially, is big enough that humans will need to do it for quite some time, even if arrogant CEOs disagree. We don't live in the future with jetpacks and men on Mars and Second Variety-style war machines -- we live in the future where a Space: 1999 reboot would have to be retitled.

Meanwhile, Congress is still spending a lot of time trying to undo the FCC's net neutrality proposals. You can only count on a few things these days, but here's one of them: if our government actually does something for the common benefit of all its people, Congress will do its damndest to destroy it. Why? Because where-oh-where will re-election campaign money come from if corporations can't get their way all the time? And also because Obama. So Demand Progress helps you calling the Congressfolk on the various Congressional committees that have tried to destroy the FCC's net neutrality proposal. (To contact your Reps and Senators generally, you can go here.) Over four million Americans submitted comments to the FCC demanding the most vigorous net neutrality regulations possible, and the FCC's proposal (which isn't "contrary to law," Sen. Cruz, because it uses powers already granted to it by legislation) would let people, not corporations, pick winners and losers on the internet. Yet Republicans still pretend ignorance of all that, because saying "we're doing whatever the big telecoms tell us to do" would give the game away.

Finally, did you know that if you happen to get pregnant outside of healthcare.gov's open enrollment period (from mid-November to mid-February), you can't get health insurance? And since a baby's on the way, you kinda need that. Of course, if certain "qualifying life events" happen to you outside of that enrollment period -- like, that you lose your job, get married, or actually give birth -- you can still sign up using healthcare.gov, but not if you get pregnant. Is that because the birth is nine months off? Hopefully not, because you'd need a lot of health care in the nine months leading up to the birth. So both Planned Parenthood and CREDO help you tell HHS Secretary Burwell to classify pregnancy as a "qualifying life event," and so enable women who don't have health insurance to get it via healthcare.gov if they become pregnant. And right-wingers who say "pregnancy is not a major life event" should answer why a birth is a major life event but pregnancy isn't -- or why pregnancy is a major life event when it's terminated, but not when it begins.

Citizens for Tax Justice evaluates the Republican House budget proposal, and finds it wanting. Key problems: their budget proposal repeals the Medicare tax expansion enacted in the Affordable Care Act and the Alternative Minimum Tax, though doing so would give a windfall to wealthy Americans, and allows the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit to expire, though doing so would put the hit on working families. It really is like Republicans are trying to do everything wrong.

Finally, long-time media producer and News Dissector blogger Danny Schechter has died at the age of 72. It would be difficult to underestimate his influence on our work here, especially in this blog's early days. While I never saw his most famous Bush Mobb-era film, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, I do highly recommend his 2006 film In Debt We Trust, made in the immediate aftermath of that nefarious bankruptcy "reform" law and in the climate of the housing bubble that gave banksters the ammunition they needed to bring down our economy.

Jim Hightower explains the rise of for-profit debt collection corporations. Like the vulture capitalists described by Greg Palast, these debt collectors buy up personal debt from banks and other creditors for mere pennies per dollar, then come after the debtors fast and hard. And most of these debtors -- unable to afford lawyers because, you know, the economy -- wind up in default, and then these corporations will get to repossess property and garnish wages forever more. Nice work if you can get it! Silver lining? A lot of the debts these corporations buy are backed by unlawfully lousy paperwork -- the corporations get employees to sign affidavits attesting to their truth, but New York AG Eric Schneiderman has been pretty successful poking holes in said affidavits. Remind you of anything -- like, say, robosigning?

California state government revokes health insurer Blue Shield of California's tax exempt status. Apparently all the constant rate-hiking, executive-overpaying, and profit-hoarding calls attention to itself after a while -- and Blue Shield's efforts at PR damage control after previous controversies turned out to be too little, too late. That multimillion dollar luxury box at a football stadium sure didn't help, either. I'm not even particularly opposed to letting a non-profit such as Blue Shield keep a little cash in reserve, but they're clearly gaming the system.

2015.03.20

It's Friday, which means, unfortunately, that Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi is due to get 50 lashes for the heinous crime of not only discussing religion in public, but encouraging other good Saudis to do the same. Actually, they convicted him of "violat(ing) Islamic values and propagat(ing) liberal thought," which sure doesn't sound any better. Mr. Badawi did receive 50 lashes on January 9 of this year, but apparently hasn't received any since, which could mean the Saudi Arabian government is somewhat sensitive to the bad publicity they'll get around the world -- or it could mean Mr. Badawi isn't well enough to withstand it. Either way, they should stop torturing him and release him, and stop giving other good Saudis trouble -- Islam surely can withstand a little sunlight, but the Saudi Arabian government insults Islam by acting otherwise. So Amnesty International helps you tell the Saudi Arabian government to stop oppressing people like Mr. Badawi simply because they exercise their God-given right to free speech.

We regard America as being too civilized for child labor, Newt Gingrich's notion of replacing school janitors with 12-year-old students notwithstanding, but American laws actually exempt tobacco farms from child labor laws -- meaning that 12-year-old kids working long hours in tobacco fields absorb way more nicotine in their bodies than any body should, let alone a body still growing. Tobacco leaves leak out nicotine when they get wet; combine that with Southern humidity and you have workers absorbing as much nicotine as if they were actually smoking cigarettes. Still, three years ago we couldn't get our government to see the wisdom in changing that situation, but lately two tobacco corporations have stopped hiring workers younger than 16, with more than a dozen others promising to eliminate child labor from their supply chains -- but a promise isn't a call to complacency, it's an opening. So Avaaz helps you tell the Obama Administration to ban child labor on tobacco farms.

Finally, the Toxic Substances Control Act is nearly 40 years old, and two distinct paths toward reform have emerged. Sens. Vitter (R-LA) and Udall (D-NM) have introduced S. 697, the unfortunately-named Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, and I say "unfortunately-named" because the late Senator introduced much more vigorous chemical safety reform legislation before his death. Though S. 697 would make it a little easier for the EPA to test chemicals and restrict the bad ones, it would also block states and localities from passing tougher legislation, and if you suspect that big chemical corporations must have written the bill, you're not alone. But Sens. Boxer (D-CA) and Markey (D-MA) have also introduced S. 725, the Alan Reinstein and Trevor Schaefer Toxic Chemical Protection Act, and that bill would advance EPA testing without the poison pill (so to speak) of federal pre-emption. So the Center for Effective Government helps you support the most vigorous chemical safety reform legislation possible.

Speaking of bad arguments, the big telecom corporations still peddle BS arguments against the FCC's net neutrality proposal. The FCC proposal doesn't assess new taxes or fees, doesn't regulate rates, and doesn't force ISPs to deliver some webpages to your computer faster than others, but that isn't stopping the ZOMG FCC IZ TEH TROJUN HORSEZ!!!! crowd, who think the FCC's order predicts, or even guarantees, "heavy government control of the internet." They keep missing the point: this government is ours, and if we think they're screwing something up, we organize to change it.

Another day, another study finding that tax breaks seem to benefit the richest folks. To which a large number of very self-impressed right-wingers respond TEHY MAKEZ TEH MOST MONEYZ SO TEHY GET TEH LARGESTZ TAX BREAKZ!!!!!, like there is no possible way to write a law otherwise. Naturally it doesn't help when President Obama decides to, say, scrap tax breaks for 529 savings plans entirely, instead of, oh, I don't know, put a ceiling on the possible tax benefits one could reap from such plans, so the rich don't sop it all up.

2015.03.19

Yesterday, five House Reps introduced five bills observers are calling the "Frack Pack" -- bills that would close loopholes in clean air and clean water law currently enjoyed by oil and gas drilling corporations -- and the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your House Reps to support these efforts. As you know, Tha Bush Mobb's 2005 energy bill exempted frackers from certain Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Clean Air Act provisions, like reporting what chemicals they use, but the five bills -- (perhaps too cleverly) named the FRAC, BREATHE, SHARED, FRESHER, and CLEANER Acts -- would, among other things, mandate corporate chemical disclosure and groundwater testing in drilling areas, and this would strengthen the case scientists have already made, that fracking uses chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders, and respiratory illnesses. We couldn't get the FRAC Act through decisive Democratic majorities in 2009 and 2010, but that doesn't mean we give up. You never give up doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is one of the few states in which coal corporations still practice longwall mining, where miners slice along the surface of a mile-long coal face (a "long wall") while another group of miners tries to keep the roof above the coal face from collapsing too haphazardly. As you might gather, what's roof to coal miners is ground to the rest of us, so when their roof collapses, buildings might collapse above it, and not just into the ground, either, but also into streams we depend upon for clean water, which pollutes those streams and/or diverts them in ways that affect local ecosystems. But the state Department of Environmental Protection is supposed to track longwall mining damages more assiduously than they've done lately; perhaps now that the voters have deposed the anti-environment Gov. Tom Corbett and replaced him with a Governor with a greener sheen, we'll get better results -- but only if we demand them. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the DEP to hold mining corporations accountable for the damage longwall mining does.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to end forced arbitration clauses in the sort of contracts consumers sign every day, then Americans for Civil Rights and Public Citizen still helps you do that. It occurs to me I've been far too nice to Republicans when excoriating their fervent desire to destroy the CFPB. After the manner of the right-wing blogger who infamously called anti-war activists "objectively pro-Saddam" back in the day, perhaps I should be calling Republicans trying to destroy the CFPB objectively pro-fraud. Or objectively pro-bankster. Or objectively pro-payday loan, or objectively pro-crippling student loan debt, or objectively pro-credit card fraud. Certainly we could accurately describe them as objectively pro-extralegal tribunal denying consumers their day in court when a corporation screws them over. I know, it's not real snappy. But it is true, and what nourishes us in the end when snappiness deserts us? Truth, that's what.

Nathan Newman informs us that "Big Data Is an Economic Justice Issue, Not Just a Privacy Problem." There's no "long story short" possible here, but you won't be surprised to learn that concentrating so much personal data into so few corporate hands tends to reinforce the income-redistribution-upward phenomenon we too often observe these days. And Mr. Newman's threefold policy prescription -- mandating more consent from customers, considering data control in antitrust actions, and banning big data-driven price discrimination -- is quite apt; if I get an action alert, you'll get an action alert.

Finally, the Obama Administration announces that the Affordable Care Act has helped over 16 million Americans to get health insurance. That number sounds, if anything, a little low, and certainly it'd be higher if certain states weren't playing around with the Medicaid expansion. The bad news? If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, nearly 10 million of them will lose their coverage -- all because someone couldn't be bothered to be a little more specific about whether federally-run exchanges can offer subsidies in a 2,000 page-plus bill. OK, and also because some people are just assholes, but you don't hand an asshole a gun, ever.

2015.03.18

As you know, the FCC issued a strong network neutrality proposal last month, one that would protect your right to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than let big telecom corporations try to force you into "fast lanes" pummeling you with sensationalist corporate content. And, as you also know, Republicans in Congress, again doing the work their corporate paymasters bid them do, have introduced the offensively-named "Internet Freedom Act," which would prevent the FCC from protecting your right to go where you want on the internet. Make no mistake, the "Internet Freedom Act" isn't concerned with your freedom, but with the "freedom" of big telecoms to make even more money while making your internet service worse. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Internet Freedom Act, and preserve real net neutrality for real people. Don't be impressed by corporate hacks telling you that of course they oppose censorship. Everyone opposes censorship, but corporations still want you to go where they want you to go, versus where you want to go.

Meanwhile, the EPA will issue final rules limiting power plant carbon emissions this summer, and though the rules as they stand will do a considerable amount of good, they could be doing more. The rules still hand out too many incentives for states to invest in gas drilling rather than coal production, when gas drilling still presents too many threats to our environment -- not just to drinking water, but to climate change itself, as the methane released by gas drilling packs a lot more carbon emissions than coal pollution does. And the EPA doesn't take into account how well we've already done in transitioning to renewable energy sources: the EPA's plan, as it stands, only requires 12 percent of total 2030 electricity production to come from renewable sources, when several states have adopted standards that would double that by the same date. Of course the big fossil fuel corporations are pushing back, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for everything we think is right. So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the EPA to write better climate change regulations.